Turn the Stars Upside Down: The Last Days and Tragic Death of Crazy Horse

by Terry C. Johnston

  Crazy Horse’s head turned slightly as his eyes opened halfway, gazing at the face of his father. The moment he moved, Worm and Touch-the-Clouds silenced their song. Crazy Horse spoke something in a whisper as a single, waist-long braid slipped to the pallet of blankets. The tall chief of the Minniconjou gently placed the braid back on the dying man’s red blanket.

  Worm scooted close, leaning over his son’s face, as if to listen. Then he whispered something to Crazy Horse. The dying man mouthed more words to his father. Then his lips moved no more.

  Surprising McGillycuddy, a brief rush of air escaped Crazy Horse’s lungs and his sunken eyes fluttered fully open—wide for a long moment. So long that the doctor thought he might be struggling to revive himself. But as quickly those eyelids relaxed and fell, while his head slumped to the side.

  In the darkened corner where the lone kerosene lamp barely penetrated, the old woman began to sob and keen. Much louder now.

  Worm looked up at the doctor and spoke sad words in a voice that cracked with grief.

  Billy Garnett tried to translate … but the half-breed could not utter a single sound.

  Placing the hypodermic back inside his bag, Dr. Valentine McGillycuddy scooted closer still, his knees touching Crazy Horse. Held his ear over the nose and mouth, not breathing himself as he listened. And eventually rocked back so he could place his fingers along the carotid artery again. Nothing.

  Nothing but the mournful sobbing from that woman in the shadows.

  * * *

  “Son, I, am here.”

  And Crazy Horse felt the sure hand of his uncle as he struggled to speak to them. Somewhere close, he heard a woman’s keening, and prayed it was not for him. Yet Crazy Horse realized it was, knew that these tears were shed for him … so he wanted to cry out that his final battle was almost over.

  Do not weep or mourn! You should rejoice for me!

  Even though he had been betrayed by his own people, not once had he forgotten what he was. A warrior of the People.

  But as soon as they no longer needed him, the Oglala threw him away.

  The pain had become like a warm, shallow pool where he lay unable to move now. No longer flushing cold or hot through him. As the pain had warmed its way into his limbs, Crazy Horse got used to the idea of this throwing away of his body. He knew he wouldn’t need his arms and legs anymore.

  Slowly turning his head, he mouthed a few words toward the blurry faces swimming somewhere just above his eyes.

  Worm bent low, placing his ear against Crazy Horse’s lips, and said, “Tell me again, my son. I am here.”

  “Oh, f-father. I am sorely hurt,” he whispered on faint puffs of shallow breath, all that his lungs could hold now that his body was being torn away from him. “T-tell my people it is no use to depend upon me anymore now.…”

  With a slow seeping blackness the one great eye that was his Lakota heart closed and everything inside him turned to night. It took a moment, but he suddenly felt freed. Light as goose down that wafts on a breeze, he was lifted, lifted … the sobbing and those mournful Lakota songs gradually fading from his hearing.

  The approaching brightness surprised him, sparkling shafts of intense light somewhere above him. He turned slightly, with great curiosity, aware for the first time of the wind lifting him, as would the wind beneath an eagle’s wings, carrying him ever higher toward the light so intense it made him shudder with joy.

  Higher and higher he climbed, as if on a rising current of warm air, making for the heavens … leaving his beloved earth, family, and friends behind. Climbing toward the magnificent Star Road that arched across the night sky.

  Such utter joy it brought him to feel the power and magnificence of the light that began to radiate from him now, a brilliance that burst forth from the heart of what he always had been.

  What he now would always be.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  September 6, 1877

  Red Cloud Agency, Neb.

  Sept. 6, 1877.

  Commr. Indian Affairs

  Washington

  Crazy Horse resisted last evening when about to be imprisoned. Had concealed weapon. Fought furiously and was killed. Considerable excitement prevailed through the night, and most of his band got away, but probably went to Spotted Tail to join other Northern Indians. I think everything is quieting down this morning. Little Big Man was wounded by Crazy Horse.

  Irwin, Agent.

  When his hair was pulled Billy jerked awake.

  In the darkness beyond he heard the faint, steady throb of Indian drums drifting in from the nearby camps, listened to the high, pained keening of the women.

  Trembling with sudden recognition, Garnett whirled in the bed that was shoved right against an open window, discovering the old man peering in at him through the narrow opening. When he recognized Worm’s wrinkled face, another shudder of fear shot through his veins as he stuffed his hands under the pillow and found his two revolvers. He loosed a snort of relief that the old Oglala hadn’t attempted to snatch his pistols and done the three of them in while they were sleeping—

  “Nephew, get up,” Worm said sadly, softly. “My son is dead. I want the bow and my arrows now.”

  “Ta’sunke Witko is dead?” Billy asked in Lakota, shifting his weight on the straw tick where he and the two other interpreters had laid down to attempt a little sleep sometime before midnight.

  On his right, Baptiste Pourier stirred and rolled over—a heavy sleeper. Curled up at Billy’s left elbow lay Louis Bordeaux. The interpreter from Spotted Tail’s agency grumbled unintelligibly as he rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

  “Touch-the-Clouds is with him now,” Worm continued. “I want to go back and tell our people that my son is gone.”

  Bordeaux snapped awake with that, rolling onto his hip and reaching under the pillow to pull his own two guns into sight. “What will become of Ta’sunke Witko now?”

  “The healer said I will go back for his body after sunrise,” Worm declared. “Give me my bow and knife now before I go back to the camp.”

  Warning squirted through his veins with a red heat. Garnett realized that when a Lakota mourned for a loved one who had fallen at the hands of a white man, their culture approved them killing any white man in retaliation. Billy dared not return any weapon to the grief-stricken father.

  “Bat! Wake up!” Bordeaux growled, reaching over Garnett to jostle Pourier’s shoulder.

  All three of them had scrunched together on Lieutenant William Clark’s narrow bed in the officer’s tiny quarters. Clark himself slept in his office, which lay on the other side of a thin wall. On a canvas cot less than five feet away lay Frank Grouard, propping himself up on an elbow at that very moment and beginning to laugh at the three interpreters below the window where the old Oglala’s gray head was framed in muted starlight.

  “What are you laughing at, Grabber?” Worm demanded angrily. “You should have been killed a long time ago! What you did to my son got his death walk all started!”

  “Your mouth is full of horse dung!” Grouard snapped at the old man.

  “You and Red Cloud are a pair worse than women!” Worm snarled at Grouard. “Him and all his kind were jealous of my son, and it was you who let the lies go on and on—”

  “Shut up, old man!” Grouard shouted, his smile gone.

  “Shut up yourself, Grabber!” Bordeaux hollered. “I was there. I heard with my own ears what you did. Twisting Crazy Horse’s words around—”

  “To hell with all of you!” Grouard roared as he rolled on the bed and his boots hit the floor. “Ta’sunke Witko was looking for death and he got what he deserved!”

  “You sad son of a bitch!” Pourier growled angrily in his heavy-tongued English. “Every time we are up against anything dangerous, you always are in the way. You’re a goddamned coward, Grouard!”

  Grouard slapped a hand to his waist. “I’ll cut out your tongue!”

  Pourier immediately pulled one of his two guns f
rom his lap, dragging back on the hammer as he said, “That old man could have reached in the window and snatched up one of our pistols! Could’ve killed Billy or Bordeaux before we could’ve shot him—just so he could kill the bastard he blames for getting his son killed.”

  “Nawww! He’s just a harmless old man,” Grouard scoffed with a mirthless smile, waving his hand as he got up to stand next to the door that would take him into Clark’s office. “You’re the coward, Bat. Got to be an old woman in your old age, ain’t you?”

  As Grouard turned the knob and disappeared through the narrow opening, banging the door behind him, Billy turned back to Worm.

  “I can’t give you your bow and knife yet,” Garnett explained gently.

  “Why can’t you give them to me? They are mine. I handed them over to you so I could go sit with my son while he died. So he would have his father at his side when he took his last breaths—”

  “I can’t do anything about it right now,” Billy responded with a little irritation. “It’s the night. All the soldiers are a little nervous now. Come morning, I’ll see the big soldier chief about your weapons.”

  “Go to him now.”

  Shaking his head, Billy said, “I won’t go to him now. It’s night—”

  “No one is sleeping,” Worm argued. “The soldiers are everywhere, awake—waiting for an attack. Don’t they realize no fighting is going to come? Let me have my weapons and I’ll go away till sunrise.”

  “I’m sorry. You’ll just have to cry it out for now and I’ll get your weapons for you when you come back to get your son’s body.”

  Instantly feeling regret for having snapped such cruel words at the grieving father, Billy reached out to touch Worm. But the old man tore his arm away from the windowsill.

  “I trusted you,” Worm said quietly. “Because my son trusted you. Now you have forgotten your mother’s people.”

  Garnett watched him turn away and trudge off into the night. Eventually Billy turned around, overhearing Grouard telling Clark that Crazy Horse was dead.

  The lieutenant sounded groggy, really very angry for this interruption. He growled, “Go back to bed, dammit! All of you! Leave me be till morning!”

  “Don’t you care that your prisoner finally died?” Garnett hollered from the back room.

  “You boys are all played out,” Clark snapped. “We all are. Now just go back to bed and let me get some sleep—”

  “Sleep?” Grouard asked. “How can we sleep now?”

  Clark responded, “You are afraid of him, aren’t you? Well, Crazy Horse can’t hurt you now, Grouard!”

  Leaping to the floor so he could stand in the doorway between the two small rooms, Garnett hissed at the lieutenant, “All you brave soldiers were afraid of Crazy Horse! That’s who’s afraid of him—alive or dead!”

  “Go to hell, Garnett,” Clark grumbled, rolling away from them and drawing the blanket back over his legs.

  As he returned to the bed and stretched out, with Bordeaux and Pourier taking their places on either side of him, Billy kept both pistols in his hands, arms crossed on his chest.

  Any man who wasn’t afraid of someone so mighty, someone as mysterious as Crazy Horse was surely a fool, Garnett ruminated as he stared at the beams of the low ceiling overhead, his mind buzzing with what all could happen now that the greatest war chief of the Lakota nation had been murdered by a white man.

  Any man was a fool not to be afraid of a living, breathing Crazy Horse …

  And he’d be a goddamned suicidal idiot not to be afraid of a stone-dead Crazy Horse.

  Camp Robinson, Neb.

  Sept. 6, 1877.

  General George Crook,

  En route to Camp Stambaugh, Wyo.

  Crazy Horse died at 11:40 P.M., last night. Some lodges have left and gone to Spotted Tail, the excitement last night being intense; but the Indians here claim that they will get them and will be responsible that none go north. Everything seems to be working well, though we have not heard from Spotted Tail. The death of this man [Crazy Horse] will save trouble.

  Clark,

  1Lt.2d. Cavalry

  Valentine McGillycuddy hadn’t been able to sleep, not with the far-off pounding of the drums, nor the mournful wailing of the squaws either. Maybe because his mind just couldn’t let go of that image of Crazy Horse’s last breath.

  For some time, Touch-the-Clouds and Worm sat motionless, watching the body as if waiting for breath to return. Eventually the tall Indian dragged the wounded man’s red blanket over Crazy Horse’s face.

  “It is well. He has looked for death and it has come,” Touch-the-Clouds spoke with grief as he got to his feet and pointed at the body. “That is the lodge of Crazy Horse. Now the chief has gone above!”

  As Touch-the-Clouds held out his right hand to McGillycuddy, they shook. The chief gazed at the doctor and said, “I touch your hands to show you I have no bad heart for anyone.”

  Worm stepped up and asked to take his son’s body with him.

  After briefly glancing at Captain James Kennington, Valentine said to Garnett, “Billy, tell Worm that I cannot turn the body over to him yet. Not until morning. Ask him to come back after sunrise. Then I can give him an ambulance to take his son back to the village.”

  When he had listened to Garnett’s explanation, Worm said, “No. I do not want your army wagon. I want a flat wagon. No army wagon.”

  The doctor escorted Worm and Touch-the-Clouds from the adjutant’s office, watching them move off in the darkness, their shoulders sagging with grief. For those few cool moments that remained before midnight, they stood in silence on the porch, beneath the immensity of the late-summer sky.

  “I’ll post a double-guard until morning, Doctor,” the officer of the day eventually spoke, still staring after the two Indians disappearing in the inky light.

  “They’ll want his body come morning,” Valentine explained.

  “As soon as Bradley says we can hand it over, the old man can have his son,” Kennington promised.

  When McGillycuddy started away from Kennington and his four sentries, Touch-the-Clouds reappeared from the night and stopped in front of the doctor, speaking the words that Billy Garnett translated.

  “He wants to go with you.”

  “Why?” McGillycuddy asked suspiciously.

  “He says to protect you,” the interpreter said.

  “Why do I need his protection?”

  With a shrug, Garnett explained, “Maybe because the Lakota will know soon enough that you were the one with Crazy Horse when he died. Maybe because the old man will tell them you gave Crazy Horse the sleeping water.”

  He stared up at the tall Indian. “Ask Touch-the-Clouds if he thinks I did anything to kill his nephew.”

  “No, he does not think you hurt his nephew,” Billy replied. “That’s why he is coming to stay the night with you. And keep watch so others do not harm you.”

  Without a word of reply, Valentine nodded at the chief, and in silence they started across the parade together, when McGillycuddy suddenly thought of a friend and his family. At the commissary the two of them turned west, walking toward the cottonwoods along Soldier Creek, moving quietly through the dark. But not quietly enough.

  “Who goes there?”

  The two of them froze for a moment. “It’s me, Seamus.”

  “Doc?”

  As McGillycuddy and the chief resumed walking toward the pale outline of the wall tent, he looked into the darkness but could not see the Irishman. “Where are you, Seamus?”

  Off to his left from the cover of the trees stepped the tall Irishman, both hands filled with the long-barreled Colt’s revolvers. McGillycuddy stared down at the army pistols, then glanced at the tent. “Samantha and the boy all right?”

  “Yeah,” Seamus said in a whisper, then wiggled his guns at the Indian. “What’s he doing with you?”

  “This is Crazy Horse’s uncle.”

  “Yeah—I recognize him. But that don’t explain why the de
ad man’s uncle’s standing here in my camp. Any more of ’em come along with you?”

  Valentine said, “You’re ’bout as nervous as a scalded cat.”

  “Ain’t you?” Donegan said. “Just listen to that.”

  They both put their ears to the night, hearing the drums and the singing, the wails and the grief easily enough. “I don’t think any of them will come, Seamus.”

  “That noise is enough to put any man’s nerves on edge. Them Sioux is mourning something terrible right now. So how come you’re so sure them Injins won’t attack?”

  “Why don’t you come to our place, all three of you?” McGillycuddy offered. “Sam and the boy can sleep in with Fanny.”

  Donegan wagged a pistol muzzle at Touch-the-Clouds. “Where’s he going?”

  “With me,” Valentine declared. “Said he wanted to come along to protect me.”

  For a long moment Donegan stared at the Indian; then he slowly shoved both pistols back into their holsters tilted at the front of his hips. “You don’t mind having company tonight, Doc?”

  “No. I’d be insulted if you turned me down.”

  Seamus disappeared behind the tentflaps, then reappeared within minutes with the sleeping babe cradled across his arms, Samantha at his elbow, a wool mackinaw pulled over her dress. Without any more said, the three of them followed the physician and Touch-the-Clouds toward the surgeon’s tiny residence, where he found his Fanny still awake, sitting in a chair.

  “I was worried sick you were in the middle of things,” she admitted, glaring over her husband’s shoulder at the tall Indian.

  “I was,” he confessed. “Crazy Horse is dead.”

  Fanny put her fingers to her lips as she watched the Donegans stepping up behind the Sioux. “Oh, my … is there trouble for it?”

  “No, I think things will be quiet, dear,” Valentine said. “But I brought our friends over to stay with us until the post quiets down again.”